Upgrading IE is a complex process that upgrades most of your major libraries with it. The actual IE executable is quite small but is linked against several crucial libs, which are all available to (and used by) the most of the rest of userland.
It doesn't matter how much hardware you throw at a problem if it needs to scale properly and you have an O(n^3) solution.
Well, maybe you're not ignoring it since you said "if it needs to scale properly". But that's a very crucial "if", and the "scale properly" only refers to certain situations.
If the array you need to sort might have several million members and you won't be sorting more than a few dozen of those arrays, yes you should use an O(n lg n) or whatever sort routine. OTOH, if the array itself is smaller (a few hundred members) but you have to sort several hundred thousand of them, quicksort or merge sort will be remarkably slow compared to the much-maligned bubble sort.
Big-O notation is an asymptotically-tight bound, not the function itself. For small datasets, not only is there no guarantee that the lower big-O algorithm will be faster, it's in fact usually the case that the allegedly "less efficient" algorithm will actually be faster.
What are you talking about? I get paid to write open-source software. Where did you get the idea that open-source software is written entirely by volunteers?
And quicksort will work just fine too. Sometimes O(n^2) will *not* work. Therefore never use bubblesort.
You totally missed the point, didn't you? There are situations where a bubble sort is faster than a merge sort or a quicksort. It has almost no setup overhead, so if you're sorting sufficiently small arrays (and what I remember from CS101 is that "sufficiently small" goes up to about 1000 members) bubble sort is actually significantly faster.
So, as a matter of fact, if you had to sort a million small arrays, bubble sort would be the only feasible option.
For aspiring CS students, check out Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.
It's based on a sort of "essential math for CS majors" course Knuth designed at Stanford when he realized people weren't getting any discrete mathematics preparation in high school.
Given the nature of CS, discrete mathematics are probably the key, though I think a grounding in algebra, the Calculus, and topology is essential too.
As a final plug, I'm fond of Feynman's Lectures on Computation both because I'm a Feynman fan and because I think it's useful to understand the physical basis of what you're doing. Most of his particular examples are dated (at one point he talks about this "revolutionary new technology called CMOS") but the principles and techniques he goes over are evergreen.
Poster above caught you on concatenation, but I'd add that DOS's pipes are POSIX-compliant. For example, type foo | findstr "baz" is roughly equivalent to cat foo | grep baz, though the DOS regex/glob capabilities are rather braindead but ultimately convertible to sensible regex's.
That's still no excuse to run Windows, though. vbscript just doesn't make up for perl/python/tcl/scheme.
Again, it's in the best interests of the companies to please consumers.
Buzz! Wrong, but thanks for playing! It's in the interest of companies to avoid pissing off consumers so much that they bother to remember the company's name. There's a big difference.
but for the most part it has fallen apart into arguments of political correctness, violence, and debates over evolution vs. creation.
(Emphasis mine.) I just wanted to point out one falsehood in an otherwise great post: not only are schools not "falling apart" into violence, there is in fact less violence in schools today than at any point since we started keeping records (late '50s I think). The violence has spread out more; there used to only be shootings in poor and minority-filled schools and now they happen in white suburban schools too, but the per capita violence rate (and actually, the raw violence numbers), are much, MUCH lower than the '60s, '70s and '80s.
You don't hear much about this because everybody's pet crusades, from the left's crusade to take away the guns to the right's crusade to make Johnny believe in Jesus to go to school, depends on this myth that the kids today are worse than their parents were, when in fact they're behaving much better.
People sign up for mailing lists intentionally all the time. And many are stupid enough to forget that they did, or just change their mind about the list, and rather than unsubscribing they bitch to their ISP or to an anti-spam service. Everybody on our lists A) requested to receive that particular list and B) confirmed the request.
But I forgot that according to the slashdot dogma, any mailing addressed to more than 10 people is "spam".
The complaint alleges that "prior to sending solicited complaints by consumers to the Optin's originating ISP's, Spamcop alters the complaints it receives by removing the email address of the person or entity seeking to be taken off a mailing list thereby rendering the email anonymous."
SpamCop does, in fact, do this, and I want to throttle them every time they do it. We work very hard to keep our mailing lists clean and we can't do it when complaints have their original email address taken out. As much as I dig what Spamcop does they're too heavy handed with legitimate mailing lists.
Fixed-price is a much better billing scheme for programming, in my experience. Rather than telling the customer "I charge $75/hour of work", I say "this CRM package will cost you $1200". If I go over time, sucks to be me. If I go under time, that's great for me.
Now, the trick with fixed-price is it doesn't work if the customer is involved in the development, because invariably he will want different interfaces, new features, etc; it's best for software that can have pretty specific and rigid requirements. The other side of that is you always have to educate your customer that A) his initial requirements and B) his subsequent changes to those requirements have consequences. Your fixed-price agreement has to include provisions for the customer to change the requirements with the result of renegotiating the total price (or, some shady people go t&m at that point, and make money hand over fist).
My customers don't know what they want. They don't really understand how their own business works and they feel lost because as their business is growing they lose track of the knowledge that was very easy to keep up with when their company only had 20 people.
It depends on your software and your client base, I guess. When I program for hire it tends to be CRM and HR packages for small businesses that have outgrown Quicken, so I guess it's understandable that I see a lot of confused people who honestly just don't understand their own company anymore.
But at least in my case, my customers really don't know what they want because they haven't yet figured out what they know and what they need to know about their own business; to some extent I can help them with that but generally I just point them to some management consulting firms.
You probably know this, but most of those are a performance hack for if's with expressions that are either very likely to be true or very likely to be false.
On the other hand, the Win2K source code that leaked had very few goto's that I saw, but then again that wasn't the very low-level kind of stuff that Linux puts its goto's in.
I see that saying anything about Java except "It is perfect for N-tier enterprise applications" gets you flamed on Slashdot. So be it.
I reiterate my statement:
IN ADDITION TO the many and varied business applications for Java, it was designed and marketed as a SIMPLE programming languages that would teach GOOD HABITS to BEGINNING programmers. This does not mean it's a toy language, or that it's not powerful. It simply means that one of the virtues of Java Sun pushed was that beginners could pick it up and learn it fairly easily.
In fact, writing a custom java applet which plays sounds and rotates images is far from trivial for most people.
No, it's quite challenging for a beginning programmer, but it's do-able and there are plenty of websites that show you how.
No, I meant Java. There are lots of people who are not professional programmers who use Java, particularly to write applets for web pages. I brought up two common things those applets do, play sounds and rotate images.
First year comp sci classes often use Java as their language. There's no sharp distinction (to the beginning programmer) between the language and the libraries and APIs. Sun marketed the free SDK towards individual home users. I was pointing out that in those senses (alleged ease of learning and free and widely available development kit), it's like BASIC. Syntactically, it's not at all like BASIC; it's a grandchild of Algol through-and-through.
I didn't say only non-programmers used Java, I said Java was marketed towards, AMONG OTHER PEOPLE, nonprofessional programmers. It's presented as an easy language to pick up on, and, in fact, lots of non professional programmers have used it to do things like rotate images and play sounds on their webpages, for instance.
I've heard it claimed that BASIC was "invented" by Microsoft
Microsoft certainly doesn't claim that.
or that they own it
Nor do they claim that
or that their first product was a BASIC interpreter
They do claim that, because it's true.
What's the connection between MS and BASIC?
BASIC was always the applications and scripting language at Microsoft. For a long time, DOS and the early Windows shipped with a free basic interpreter (sadly, those days are over).
Visual Basic remains one of Microsoft's flagship products. It's philosophy is similar to the original BASIC philosophy: you shouldn't have to be a comp sci graduate to write computer programs. Whether VB succeeds in that regard is another question, but it's what they intended.
BASIC is still Microsoft's language for application automation (think Visual Basic for Applications), Web development (ASP with VBScript), and as a tool control language for gluing together objects written in lower level languages. In a sense, some form of BASIC fills the roles in Windows that Scheme, Perl, and TCL occupy in UNIX.
The popularity of BASIC waned as computers got more sophisticated, and newer languages were developed to take advantage of the power. Many of those languages, including the Internet's Java, have their roots in BASIC.
That's an odd thing to say. In terms of syntax it's hard to call Java "rooted" in a non-algol language like BASIC. I guess it does share with BASIC the fact that both are marketed towards non-programmers (well, people who don't program for a living, at least).
Congresspeople and their staffs aren't going to be using this for Internet access, people. It's for tourists and such. Capitol Hill and most of non-residential northwest DC are pretty rife with hotspots already, anyways.
Mad props to the first person who warchalks the reflecting pool when it's drained...
Hmm... not sure what you mean. For starters, the axioms in Godel's proof did not need to be finite, merely denumerable. And he didn't make conclusions about what a system "can" or "can not" "talk" about. He simply showed that in certain systems that share characteristics with the Principia Mathematica one may construct propositions that cannot be proven true or false.
Slashdot Mirror
Upgrading IE is a complex process that upgrades most of your major libraries with it. The actual IE executable is quite small but is linked against several crucial libs, which are all available to (and used by) the most of the rest of userland.
Well, maybe you're not ignoring it since you said "if it needs to scale properly". But that's a very crucial "if", and the "scale properly" only refers to certain situations.
If the array you need to sort might have several million members and you won't be sorting more than a few dozen of those arrays, yes you should use an O(n lg n) or whatever sort routine. OTOH, if the array itself is smaller (a few hundred members) but you have to sort several hundred thousand of them, quicksort or merge sort will be remarkably slow compared to the much-maligned bubble sort.
Big-O notation is an asymptotically-tight bound, not the function itself. For small datasets, not only is there no guarantee that the lower big-O algorithm will be faster, it's in fact usually the case that the allegedly "less efficient" algorithm will actually be faster.
What are you talking about? I get paid to write open-source software. Where did you get the idea that open-source software is written entirely by volunteers?
You totally missed the point, didn't you? There are situations where a bubble sort is faster than a merge sort or a quicksort. It has almost no setup overhead, so if you're sorting sufficiently small arrays (and what I remember from CS101 is that "sufficiently small" goes up to about 1000 members) bubble sort is actually significantly faster.
So, as a matter of fact, if you had to sort a million small arrays, bubble sort would be the only feasible option.
For aspiring CS students, check out Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.
It's based on a sort of "essential math for CS majors" course Knuth designed at Stanford when he realized people weren't getting any discrete mathematics preparation in high school.
Given the nature of CS, discrete mathematics are probably the key, though I think a grounding in algebra, the Calculus, and topology is essential too.
As a final plug, I'm fond of Feynman's Lectures on Computation both because I'm a Feynman fan and because I think it's useful to understand the physical basis of what you're doing. Most of his particular examples are dated (at one point he talks about this "revolutionary new technology called CMOS") but the principles and techniques he goes over are evergreen.
Poster above caught you on concatenation, but I'd add that DOS's pipes are POSIX-compliant. For example, type foo | findstr "baz" is roughly equivalent to cat foo | grep baz, though the DOS regex/glob capabilities are rather braindead but ultimately convertible to sensible regex's.
That's still no excuse to run Windows, though. vbscript just doesn't make up for perl/python/tcl/scheme.
Rate each of those 7 and you'll have a nice index for each distro you rank.
Buzz! Wrong, but thanks for playing! It's in the interest of companies to avoid pissing off consumers so much that they bother to remember the company's name. There's a big difference.
On a big pile of money, surrounded by beautiful women.
(Emphasis mine.) I just wanted to point out one falsehood in an otherwise great post: not only are schools not "falling apart" into violence, there is in fact less violence in schools today than at any point since we started keeping records (late '50s I think). The violence has spread out more; there used to only be shootings in poor and minority-filled schools and now they happen in white suburban schools too, but the per capita violence rate (and actually, the raw violence numbers), are much, MUCH lower than the '60s, '70s and '80s.
You don't hear much about this because everybody's pet crusades, from the left's crusade to take away the guns to the right's crusade to make Johnny believe in Jesus to go to school, depends on this myth that the kids today are worse than their parents were, when in fact they're behaving much better.
The rest of your point stands, though.
People sign up for mailing lists intentionally all the time. And many are stupid enough to forget that they did, or just change their mind about the list, and rather than unsubscribing they bitch to their ISP or to an anti-spam service. Everybody on our lists A) requested to receive that particular list and B) confirmed the request.
But I forgot that according to the slashdot dogma, any mailing addressed to more than 10 people is "spam".
SpamCop does, in fact, do this, and I want to throttle them every time they do it. We work very hard to keep our mailing lists clean and we can't do it when complaints have their original email address taken out. As much as I dig what Spamcop does they're too heavy handed with legitimate mailing lists.
Fixed-price is a much better billing scheme for programming, in my experience. Rather than telling the customer "I charge $75/hour of work", I say "this CRM package will cost you $1200". If I go over time, sucks to be me. If I go under time, that's great for me.
Now, the trick with fixed-price is it doesn't work if the customer is involved in the development, because invariably he will want different interfaces, new features, etc; it's best for software that can have pretty specific and rigid requirements. The other side of that is you always have to educate your customer that A) his initial requirements and B) his subsequent changes to those requirements have consequences. Your fixed-price agreement has to include provisions for the customer to change the requirements with the result of renegotiating the total price (or, some shady people go t&m at that point, and make money hand over fist).
My customers don't know what they want. They don't really understand how their own business works and they feel lost because as their business is growing they lose track of the knowledge that was very easy to keep up with when their company only had 20 people.
It depends on your software and your client base, I guess. When I program for hire it tends to be CRM and HR packages for small businesses that have outgrown Quicken, so I guess it's understandable that I see a lot of confused people who honestly just don't understand their own company anymore.
But at least in my case, my customers really don't know what they want because they haven't yet figured out what they know and what they need to know about their own business; to some extent I can help them with that but generally I just point them to some management consulting firms.
I hate KDE, but kportage is a decent app, and lets you merge, unmerge, inject, clean, prune, and depclean.
You probably know this, but most of those are a performance hack for if's with expressions that are either very likely to be true or very likely to be false.
On the other hand, the Win2K source code that leaked had very few goto's that I saw, but then again that wasn't the very low-level kind of stuff that Linux puts its goto's in.
I see that saying anything about Java except "It is perfect for N-tier enterprise applications" gets you flamed on Slashdot. So be it.
I reiterate my statement:
IN ADDITION TO the many and varied business applications for Java, it was designed and marketed as a SIMPLE programming languages that would teach GOOD HABITS to BEGINNING programmers. This does not mean it's a toy language, or that it's not powerful. It simply means that one of the virtues of Java Sun pushed was that beginners could pick it up and learn it fairly easily.
No, it's quite challenging for a beginning programmer, but it's do-able and there are plenty of websites that show you how.
Unlambda.
A language combining the efficiency and speed of Haskell with the maintainability and ease of use of Intercal.
No, I meant Java. There are lots of people who are not professional programmers who use Java, particularly to write applets for web pages. I brought up two common things those applets do, play sounds and rotate images.
First year comp sci classes often use Java as their language. There's no sharp distinction (to the beginning programmer) between the language and the libraries and APIs. Sun marketed the free SDK towards individual home users. I was pointing out that in those senses (alleged ease of learning and free and widely available development kit), it's like BASIC. Syntactically, it's not at all like BASIC; it's a grandchild of Algol through-and-through.
I didn't say only non-programmers used Java, I said Java was marketed towards, AMONG OTHER PEOPLE, nonprofessional programmers. It's presented as an easy language to pick up on, and, in fact, lots of non professional programmers have used it to do things like rotate images and play sounds on their webpages, for instance.
Jeez, you Java people are sensitive.
Microsoft certainly doesn't claim that.
Nor do they claim that
They do claim that, because it's true.
BASIC was always the applications and scripting language at Microsoft. For a long time, DOS and the early Windows shipped with a free basic interpreter (sadly, those days are over).
Visual Basic remains one of Microsoft's flagship products. It's philosophy is similar to the original BASIC philosophy: you shouldn't have to be a comp sci graduate to write computer programs. Whether VB succeeds in that regard is another question, but it's what they intended.
BASIC is still Microsoft's language for application automation (think Visual Basic for Applications), Web development (ASP with VBScript), and as a tool control language for gluing together objects written in lower level languages. In a sense, some form of BASIC fills the roles in Windows that Scheme, Perl, and TCL occupy in UNIX.
That's an odd thing to say. In terms of syntax it's hard to call Java "rooted" in a non-algol language like BASIC. I guess it does share with BASIC the fact that both are marketed towards non-programmers (well, people who don't program for a living, at least).
Well, it's actually called the GNU Network Object Model Environment
Congresspeople and their staffs aren't going to be using this for Internet access, people. It's for tourists and such. Capitol Hill and most of non-residential northwest DC are pretty rife with hotspots already, anyways.
Mad props to the first person who warchalks the reflecting pool when it's drained...
Hmm... not sure what you mean. For starters, the axioms in Godel's proof did not need to be finite, merely denumerable. And he didn't make conclusions about what a system "can" or "can not" "talk" about. He simply showed that in certain systems that share characteristics with the Principia Mathematica one may construct propositions that cannot be proven true or false.